Atomic Habits An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

That's why the book Atomic Habits has sold so many copies, is because we all know we need to work on our habits.

And that's why like a lot of people that have experienced something like this, if you ... In atomic habits, that's the biggest thing is you can change your habits like this if you change your surroundings.

An author named James Clear, who wrote a book called Atomic Habits. It's the bestselling and one of the best books of the last generation.

author of the bestselling book Atomic Habits.

the heart of your book, Atomic Habits, is that the idea that small habits can make a big difference.

Same with atomic habits.

I love the book Atomic Habits, and it talks about a similar example of if you really want to get really fit, build a gym habit, have the best technique. The very first skill is just driving your car to the gym. Can you do that every day?

James clear, uh, his book atomic habits dives deep into this.

James Clear, his book atomic habits dives deep into this.

I just met with a... amazing friend and author named James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits.

The great James Clear is the author of one of the most influential books of our generation, Atomic Habits. He sold over 25 million copies worldwide and has helped millions of people transform their lives through the power of small changes.

I wanted to write the most practical habits book that's ever been written. I hoped that if you just read this one book, you wouldn't need to read anything else.

James Clear, who wrote the book, Atomic Habits, is one of my favorite writers.

I wish I had atomic habits.

Do you read James Clear's brilliant book, Atomic Habits?

I think of like atomic habits is a viral book.

In a lot of ways I feel like that is like maybe the most enormous hurdle to cross because if you're genuinely interested in a habit There are like endless ways to improve it But if you're not actually interested, you're just kind of forcing the issue or making yourself do it Even the obvious improvements are going to feel like a chore.

And so many of our habits are socially driven like that.

So maybe if my goal is to read a lot this year, I the first thing I should do is create a good reads account Because then my my entire you know reading history will be online and I'll be judged by my peers about whether I hit my goal or not.

You know picking two friends that are also interested in reading and starting a book club is another way to do it You don't even have to start one like you could just join one. That's already going Um, there are there are tons tons of ways to be part of that You know start browsing browsing subreddits with people who love books and just like engage there and leave comments And then now you're kind of like surrounded by other people who are reading and feel like you have a little bit of momentum There there are many ways to do it But the core idea is like how can I build connection with people who already have the habits? I want to have and the more that those people start to become your friends or start to populate your thoughts The more that you're going to feel compelled to do those things as well.

I'm reminded of that quote from Ed Latimore where he says the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door Like there are a lot of things in life. They're like that so Think about the big 10-year vision scale it down to the next hour or five minutes or two Two minutes make it as small as possible and cast some little vote make some little action today That moves you toward that big picture view that you have for the future.

James Clear wrote the book Atomic Habits.

Some of our guests include Atomic Habits author James Clear,

James Clear wrote the Burke atomic habits.

New York Times best-selling author of Atomic Habits, James Clear,

It's like atomic habits or tell people, give me good -

It's like atomic habits or tell people, give me good -

So whether I'm reading Think and Grow Rich or Atomic Habits or I'm watching a Kobe Bryant interview when he was alive on YouTube, ... I study two hours a day.

I have like the book atomic habits, you know, it talks about like work life balance, right? And so I'm always leaning into family or work.

James Clear who wrote the book of Tommy Cab he's a great guy I've had him a couple times in my groups on my podcast and he says something so profound he says you don't rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems you don't rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your system

He's not a professor or psychologist, but he's incredibly intuitive.

So maybe I should call him a psychologist.

it's a pretty gosh darn good book.

I know the book Self-Help, which I believe was the origin of the phrase.

Yeah, so I remember coming across this book and reading it.

This began with Thomas Carlisle.

So the reason why resolutions don't stick is because people make outcome based resolutions.

So instead of I'm going to lose 20 pounds, which is the outcome, the process, I'm going to work out five days a week. Still not going to work. You got to keep digging.

The secret sauce is making identity based goals.

So you resolve that I am the kind of person who never misses a workout. That's who I am. Exercise is a priority for me.

Your New Year's resolution could be to read more books. It's not going to happen.

I finally listened to the book Atomic Habits which was a really popular sort of self-help book

I just recently finished listening to the audiobook of atomic habits, a very popular book about making good habits and breaking bad ones.

It was a good book. It was really good. There was some really good stuff in there. So I really recommend it.

There was a story about like a British biking team that constantly lost, like they were not the most competitive in their field.

So go check out atomic habits if you want. This is not like an ad for the book.

I'm like giving you a full fucking summary of the book.

This is a little nugget from James Clear. He's the author of Atomic Habits and he's a guest on the show episode 108.

we've got habits academy creator James clear shares processes and practicals we can use to incrementally change our own lives for the better here's a quick bite it's not a single one percent change that's going to transform your life it's a thousand of them remember I feel like giving up I think about the stone cutter who pounds a stone a hundred times without a crack showing and then on the hundred and first below it splits into and I know that it wasn't the hundred and first that did it it was all the hundred that came before newsworthy stories are only about outcomes when we see outcomes all day long on social and on the news we tend to overvalue them and overlook the process like you're never going to see a new story that is like man eats salad for lunch today like this just not right it's only a story six months later when man loses a hundred pounds the real reason habits matter is because they provide evidence for the type of beliefs that you have about yourself and ultimately you can reshape your sense of self yourself image the person that you believe you are if you embody the identity a lot of people watch too much tv or don't want to play as many video games they do or whatever if you walk into pretty much any living room where do all the couches and chairs face they all face the tv so it's like what is this room designed to get you to do you could take a chair and turn it away from the television you could also increase the friction associated with the task so you could take batteries out of the remote so that it takes an extra five or ten seconds to start it up each time and maybe that's enough time for you to be like do I really want to watch something or am I just doing this mind the point here is if you want to build a good habit you've got make it obvious if you want to break about how do you just make it invisible your entire life you are existing inside some environment and most of the time you're existing inside environments that you don't think about right you're like in that sense you're kind of like the victim of your environment but you don't have to be the victim of it you can be the architect of it for more with James clear including what it takes to break bad habits while creating good ones and how to leverage tiny habits for giant outcomes check out episode one oh eight on the Jordan Harbinger show with James clear

Get your butt to bed early, don't look at your phone, use blackout curtains, get a night mask, you will wake up at 6 a.m. if you go to bed at 9 or 10, then go to the gym, use the techniques from Atomic Habits with James Clear, that's episode 108 by the way of this show and get to the gym four plus days a week.

James Clearsen other perfect example of this. Most of the listeners probably already know who James Clears if not definitely worth checking out.

Yeah. He was on the show a couple of times he's on this show as well with atomic habits. Yeah. And everybody knows I mean he's the he's late if you look at what he's done.

this week we had James clear talking about habit formation how you can change your environment to build better habits, how you can create habits that stick really good science in his new book atomic habits

I love this book. I love this interview and I think you will as well.

And we'll discover that what you do depends on the type of person that you believe you are.

I think I mean, that's kind of a hallmark of habits and one of the things I say in the book is that habits of the compound interests of self improvement.

I say this in the conclusion of atomic habits it's not a single 1% change that's going to transform your life it's a thousand of them and so you need to like make all these small sustainable changes that are easy to do by themselves but then layer them on top of each other.

The goal isn't to run a marathon it's to become a runner. Right the goal isn't to read the book it's to become a reader which would read to 100 books.

James Clearen, another perfect example of this. Most of the listeners probably already know who James Clears if not definitely worth checking out.

Yeah, he was on the show a couple of times, he's on this show as well with atomic habits. Yeah, and everybody knows, I mean, he's the, he's late if you look at what he's done.

I remember when I asked him because James Clear's readership is in that hundreds of thousands of subscribers and he told me he basically decided that he would write two articles a week. That was that was the solution to his hundreds of thousands of subscribers and he said he's like, think about it. That's the one thing that was in his control.

this week we had James clear talking about habit formation how you can change your environment to build better habits, how you can create habits that stick really good science in his new book atomic habits

James Clearen, other perfect example of this. Most of the listeners probably already know who James Clears if not definitely worth checking out.

Yeah. He was on the show a couple of times he's on this show as well with atomic habits. Yeah. And everybody knows I mean he's the he's late if you look at what he's done.

I remember when I asked him because James Clears readership is in that hundreds of thousands of subscribers and he told me he basically decided that he would write two articles a week.

this week we had James clear talking about habit formation how you can change your environment to build better habits, how you can create habits that stick really good science in his new book atomic habits

I am reading Atomic Habits which is a great book

I was at First Light Books the other day and I saw two copies of James Clear's Atomic Habits.

And this one said 15 million copies sold on the cover, which is an incredible amount.

So just 12 million copies sold between those two printings.

And I said, I actually think we have one that says 20 million now.

Seriously, that's like thriller level big for a book.

identity-based approach kind of James Clear in atomic habits. Like what's your identity in this area of your life? And what does that look like? And then you build habits and processes to cast votes for that identity, to use his terms.

James Clear talks about this a lot in atomic habits, but I believe and I've lived it in my life.

in atomic habits James clear talks about the importance of becoming just 1% better every day this may not seem like much but he writes the difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding here's how the math works out if you can get 1% better each day for one year you'll end up 37 times better by the time you're done none of us know how long the crisis will last or how long we're going to be stuck at home but we are in control of what we do to improve during this time don't be fooled the version of you that comes out of quarantine can be much better than the person that went in if you make tiny positive changes every single day

imagine following up something like Atomic Habits it's like impossible

I love James clears book atomic habits I got to see him put this book together we go way back we sell this book my books or the pain approach but I think the idea of atomic habits is like he says the subtitle says tiny changes remarkable results but even think about what an atomic what it means to say in atomic habits not just explosive like an atom is the smallest possible building block you can think of so when we think about habits let's start really really small don't lie to yourself don't get ahead of yourself just think of the smallest thing you can start with.

James Clears got this many five store reviews on Amazon and I've only got this many five store, you know, that whole shabang.

I think Atomic Havids is actually a very good book and third I don't know how many I'm counting now but whatever there is no universe in which that book selling more or less copies affects my life in any negative or positive way.

One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where desired behavior is the new normal.

Atomic habits is just a monster of a best seller, a really, really good book.

If you haven't read Atomic Habits well there's a reason the book is a monster best seller and it drives with a lot of my thinking and you'll see us dive into a lot of that in today's episode.

So pick up Atomic Habits, join us in the daily stoke, new year, new you challenge dailystoke.com slash challenge and enjoy this week's episode.

And so I usually encourage people start there like start with the identity that you want to have or start with the lifestyle that you want to live and then start doing small habits that reinforce that identity rather than just being like, oh, I'm going to lose 40 pounds and then when that doesn't happen in three weeks, you inevitably feel, you know, demotivated.

And it's sort of paradoxical so I get why it's hard for people to understand. Like you hear Bill Bellic, checkers, someone talk about the process and you're like, but you've won the most games out of anyone or in Zen and the art of archery. You know, he talks about put the target out of your mind.

James clears books starts with him getting hit in the eye with a baseball and like nearly dying from it and then you read that chapter and you're like I have to read the best rest of this book I cannot put it down after this I remember because I read an early copy of that book and I was like James the story is incredible it has nothing to do with what the book is nothing like nothing like it's actually because James is such a genius at understanding how this stuff works it's almost like so well done that it helps reveal how it's done like the fact that the story has nothing to do with habits or habit formations it's just a compelling story is almost like the mask slipping a little bit and him accidentally revealing the power of what we're talking about and it's like when so I read James's book I don't know four years ago when it came out and I probably remember you know five or six things about habits from that book yeah five or six I have 250 pages five or six things I remember everything about the baseball story to begin with because I remember reading it in such wrapped attention at the beginning

James Clears Atomic Habits

If I asked you how many subscriptions you have, would you be able to list all of them and how much you are paying?

And this is me chatting with James Clear if you haven't read Atomic Habits, absolutely should fantastic book. I think it was actually the first book that we sold at the Painted Port.

New Year's resolution, the problem with that is that you are focusing, you're starting with the result. I want to lose 40 pounds. I want to learn, I want to know Spanish, you know, like you're picking a thing and you're saying I want to get that result.

And this is kind of one of the, I don't know, discoveries I had as I was working on the book and writing about the topic more is that when you stick to the process like you're saying right now when you like perform habits consistently, every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become.

But if you do care about the outcome so much, then you need to focus on the system in the process because that's how you actually achieve it. And furthermore, being outcome focused will help you achieve a goal one time. But if you want to keep winning again and again, you have to be focused on the system.

I love James Clear's book, Atomic Habits.

I got to see him put this book together we go way back. We sell this book my book store, the Pain in Ports.

But I think the idea of Atomic Habits is like as the subtitle says, tiny changes remarkable results but even think about what an atomic what it means to say in Atomic Habits.

Not just explosive like an atom is the smallest possible building block you can think of.

when James Claire who's uh who's book we mentioned in day one when he's talking about atomic habits he's not just talking about these Trent and i was talking to James last night he's not just talking about these explosive enormous habits that you know change everything he's he's also saying that you know an atom an atom is the absolute smallest thing and he's talking so what he's really talking about is the smallest smallest thing and so um uh if i could sort of leave with with with one thing it's it's just you know just open just open the email you don't you don't have to do all don't don't say well i don't know if i want to do that one just just promise yourself you'll open the email every day for 21 days you can decide you don't like the challenge when you get there or you can tweak it you can do it some other way the main thing though is just open the challenge that's really what we're talking about just open the challenge

James Clear, author of The Wonderful Best Seller, Atomic Habits, told me on The Daily Stoic Podcast recently that since becoming a father, he has carved out two sacred hours in the morning to do his writing.

Atomic Hobbits, I'm currently reading Slight Edge.

I think that's what atomic habits is really about. It's like what are the little things that cumulatively add up in a big way?

he ended up publishing one of the best books of the last several years, a book that I think about on a regular basis. Even if you just think about the title, it should influence you, which is to me a sign of a great book. I'm talking about James Clear and his book Atomic Habits.

Atomic having a double meaning, not just meaning explosive habits, but also the smallest possible size of a habit focusing on the little things that put in forth a chain reaction that can in fact be explosive.

It's a monster seller for a reason.

this whole discussion about New Year's resolutions is one of the central things I talk about in atomic habits is this idea of like starting with identity rather than results.

when you stick to the process, like you're saying right now, when you like perform habits consistently, every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become.

And then he went and wrote one of the best selling books like of the century to date.

Small changes compound into remarkable results. No is a decision. Yes is a responsibility.

And so many of the strategies in Atomic Habits and in the Atomic Habits workbook are giving you ways to bounce back from a loss.

This is one of the central things I talk about in Atomic Habits is this idea of like starting with identity rather than results.

I actually have a passage from the Tao Te Ching and atomic habits that says something of like, the way of life is to be supple and, you know, flexible. The way of death is to be brittle and hard.

I will say a book that I've read. Atomic Habits. It's that. And it kind of like getting better 1% every day and doing those things, that 1% will add up and add up. And that's the drive that you have to have. I always relate back to it. But yeah, doing something every day different to make you 1% better.

I will say a book that I've read. Atomic Habits.

It's that. And it kind of like getting better 1% every day and doing those things that 1% will add up and add up. And that's the drive that you have to have.

Comic Habits by James Clear, talking about the importance of habits and developing very, very good habits.